Literature and religion have long been closely intertwined. For centuries, the Bible stood as the most important book in Western culture, and writers have fed off its imagery, stories, and language to create new work, whether or not that work had an explicit religious purpose. In this course, we will examine how the relationship between religion and literature has continued and transformed in today’s “secular age”. Students will be encouraged to discuss a broad range of topics relating to religion, including mysticism, community, ethics, and ritual, and examine literature’s relation to four of Christianity’s expressive forms: scripture, hymn, confession and prayer. While the course will assume some basic familiarity with both Christianity and the Bible, students will be given resources to help them expand their knowledge of these topics.
The course will begin with two lectures investigating how contemporary novelists – including Colm Tóibín, Jim Crace, and Michèle Roberts – have reimagined the narratives of the Gospels, and trace the intersection of literary fiction and the quest for the historical Jesus back to George Eliot’s translation of Strauss’s pioneering Life of Jesus in 1846. The third lecture will explore the work of the Canadian poet Anne Carson. Carson’s use of religious themes reflects a lapse from her Catholic upbringing, but also derives from an ongoing dialogue with the ideas of the radical Christian thinker and mystic Simone Weil. The fourth lecture will examine unorthodox approaches to the genre of the spiritual autobiography, looking at Living with a Wild God by Barbara Ehrenreich and Leaving Alexandria by Richard Holloway.
The final lecture will focus on the religious motifs in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, in particular its use of prayer-like vocabulary and modes of address. The lecture will take into account the recent stage adaptation of the novel, and consider the connections between McBride’s work and the forsaken female characters in Samuel Beckett’s plays.